This study examines how email is utilized to enact maintenance behaviors in interpersonal relationships and explores whether geographic distance between individuals affects this process. Two hundred twenty-six college students accumulated personal email messages over a one-week period. These emails were coded using Canary and Stafford's (1994) maintenance strategy topology. Results indicate that self-disclosure (openness), discussing social networks, and positivity were the main categories found in email to family members and friends. For romantic partners, the most common categories were assurances, openness, positivity, and discussing social networks. Romantic partners and family members were more likely than friends to use assurances, and family members were more likely than romantic partners to refer to the social network. There were few differences between geographically close and long-distance interpersonal relationships. that originally began face-to-face (Boneva, Kraut, & Frohlich, 2001;Stafford, Kline, & Dimmick, 1999). Cummings and Kraut (2002) claim, ''[T]he growth in the number of Americans online means that people can use the Internet to keep in touch with a larger proportion of their friends and relationships' ' (p. 229). When people in the United States were recently asked how often they used the Internet on a typical day, 56% reported sending or reading email, 10% reported sending instant messages, and 9% reported using an online social network like MySpace or Facebook (Pew Internet, 2007a). The present study examines how college students maintain interpersonal relationships utilizing email and makes three contributions to the literature on computer-mediated and interpersonal communication: 1) it expands work on relational maintenance beyond face-to-face interaction by examining how email is utilized to enact maintenance behaviors, 2) it examines relationships that originated face-to-face, comparing email use in long-distance and geographically close family, friendships, and romantic relationships, and 3) it examines naturally occurring email content in interpersonal relationships, rather than relying solely on self-reports of behavior.
Literature ReviewRelationship Maintenance and Equity Theory Equity theory is a social exchange theory that can illuminate the strategies that people use to maintain their relationships (Stafford & Canary, 1991), including email (Rabby & Walther, 2003). Equity theory, as applied to interpersonal relationships, holds that people pursue and maintain relationships based on perceived rewards (Stafford & Canary, 1991). Walster, Berscheid, and Walster (1973) defined an equitable relationship as one in which participants perceive that both parties are incurring equal amounts of positive and negative consequences from the relationship. In other words, relationship satisfaction is determined by comparing partners' outcome ratio, or rewards, to their input ratio, or costs (Canary & Stafford, 1992;Walster, Berscheid, & Walster, 1973). If the costs outweigh the rewards, the r...